I'll have just come back from a crazy family reunion on a beach in New Jersey. It's the second time we've done it, even though literally everyone in my family hates the beach and I'm so confused as to why we keep going there!!

What have you worked on in the past year that you're most happy with?

Finished my book (How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Future of the Neighborhood) Nation Books/Perseus/(Hachette(???)) which is about why gentrification is bad, and why it has less to do with coffee shops and more to do with global capitalism.

What can people expect from your conversation with Shatia Strother?

We approach gentrification from two different perspectives. I'm looking at these global macro factors, and she obviously knows and cares about all those factors but she's working on the ground, seeing the day to day impacts of displacement. And I'm curious about, and will talk to her about, what we can learn from those being gentrified and displaced. What are policy experts not getting? Is there any hope in gentrified neighborhoods that things will change?